I've just listened to the BitShares special Hangout.

The fees actual structure have been mentioned but without further thoughts. Someone said something like "didn't we have kind of a solution for that?" and the conversation on the topic died.

Just as a reminder the solution we've encountered a while ago was a very good one !!!

The conclusion was that the best way to handle fee without killing the referral program was to have a hybrid system with rate limited Tx and percentage based fees.

I'll use an example with BTS to explain it :

A transaction from 0.00001 BTS to 200 BTS has not fee at all. (Micropayment possible !)
A transaction bigger than 200 BTS has a 0.1% fee (no one will ever complain to pay 1$ on a 1000$ Tx nor to pay 100$ to move 100,000$)
We could also have a top cap. Tx higher than 100,000$ keep that 100$ fee for example.

To avoid the possible attacks allowed by the Free Tx, we limit the number of transactions someone can do in relation to your funds in BTS (rate limited Tx).
So the more you can abuse the system, the more BTS you need to have in it ... and the less you want to screw it up ;p
It also implies that any company on BTS should have some fund in BTS if they plan on having lots of Tx.
I don't know how they manage that part on the Steem blockchain but their solution may also be interesting.

Having this new system give another chance to the referral program. If you refer a person who will, in a no so distant future, pay its gasoline, cigarettes or groceries with Blockpay, they will produce much more fees that what they would have with the 2015 stable fees structure.
Let's imagine a person who is using crypto for gasoline and from time to time for other stuff in a typical month. Gasoline twice, 10 cigarettes boxes and a couple of groceries at the local small shop accepting crypto. That would be around 250$ paid, so around 0.25$.
60% of that goes to the referrer, so around 1.8$ a year.
I think that it would be enough to motivate people to start again thinking to promote BitShares!

The trading on the platform could also take 0.1% and free order creation and cancellation. Other feature on the platform could integrate this system and produce more and more fees for the referrers.

A Little story to show how reviving the referral program is important. I spent months on building Bitsharesfcx.com website. I started with learning HTML, CSS and some PHP from knowing absolutely nothing .... really nothing, not even what <p> or </br> meant !!! My two friends translated the whole BitShares.org website, the BM blog, flyers, infographics, articles.. we've also translated the book from Max Write.
We have done all of this because we thought BitShares is amazing, we want to help to spread the word and BM just had given to us the perfect tool, the referral program. We made the math and we concluded we could invest a shit load of time in the website. We were going to be the gateway for the millions of people that speak french but not English well enough to learn about BitShares in the next years.
Well, since the referral system has been put in sleep mode, there is a very perceptible lack of motivation in our team and it's very understandable. We are also in sleep mode, nothing has really changed for the last year or so. We may have spent all this time for nothing, that isn't the kind of thought that gives you the motivation to keep working.
If the referral program would be back, providing a way to produce incomes by promoting BitShares, we would probably end up beeing back on the project.
Conclusion, the referral program works, the problem is the current fee structure.

I wanted to share my experience and summarise what I still have in mind about this topic so we can include it in the @Chris4210 BitShares improvement list.